To Watch the World End or, Link
by kiboeme
Summary: He came back different. He came back sad. No one knows exactly why. But Colin is determined to try and get to know his missing brother. One-shot, drabble. K.


Everything was settling back into its place, where it had been before and where it had always been meant to be. He, Talo, and Beth were back in Ordon Village, safe and sound with their parents. Malo was settled in Castle Town, making bucketloads of money from his new chain of stores and sending money back to his family every month. Ilia had come back to Ordon for a while, then returned to Kakariko Village to study shamanism and medicine with Renado. Telma visited everyone quite often, filled with stories about the men and women that passed through her bar drunk. Life was different, of course—the other children had nightmares in the middle of the night about the bulbins' greedy eyes, Ilia was gone altogether, and the world had become a whole lot bigger for the Ordonians.

Link never seemed right though. He was in Ordon for a few weeks. He wrote a note on the back of a painting of the Ordon goats that said something about returning once he had fixed some things.

Colin waited for Link to come back for a long time.

Shad had come sniffing around Ordon for him, saying something about Link knowing how to get to the sky and demanding that the villagers stop hiding him. "He knows," he kept repeating, "he knows. He's been there, I swear."

Rusl kept trying to teach Colin how to fight. He was learning quickly, but without much heart. There was only one person he had really wanted to learn from, only one person he really wanted to learn _for_. Link. But Link was gone.

Uli gave birth to a healthy baby girl and named her Aryll. He knew Link was adopted, but he insisted that she had his eyes.

Colin was able to travel Hyrule with his father not too long after he returned home. Rusl had told him stories about Link before; in fact, Link's daring exploits as a child had been Ordonian legend for some time. But after It, there were a whole new slew of stories. One, Rusl had been there to witness himself—Link, he said, single-handedly cleaved through a mass of monsters the entire Resistance couldn't have hoped to defeat. According to the other members of the Resistance, Link had somehow made it through the harshest places known to man.

He had gone all the way through the depths of the Gerudo Mesa, said Auru, possibly even made it into the Arbiter's Grounds that no one even remembered existed. Ashei saw him vanish into the shadowy blizzards of Snowpeak and return with nary a scratch. Fyer talked about a canon Link had used to launch himself far higher than his canon could reach, never coming back down for hours on end. Link had come and dismantled it recently, he said. The time and date he gave were right after he had left Ordon.

Nobody knew the whole thing, probably not even the Princess Zelda herself. After all, she hadn't been involved in it at all… had she? No, nobody but Link knew what he had done, where he had gone.

But everyone had stories.

The Gorons spoke of their brother, Link of the Strong Heart, who wouldn't be intimidated or turned from his path up the mountain. He beat their elder in wrestling and returned life to the mountain. "He saved us," they said. "He saved us when no one could." They never told him what they had been saved from, only that Link had passed through their trials. He was strong as a Goron, they said, and had been gifted with their greatest treasure to solidify his identity in their tribes as a hero.

Ralis told Colin about a gentle man who carried a sword on his back but a pearl in his heart. Link had one of the purest souls he had ever seen. He had hunted down the snow monster terrorizing the Zora's Domain.

"I would give my life to him, if he ever would have allowed me to."

Even the people in Castle Town knew him. He was the only one who had ever managed to beat the STAR Game. He donated thousands of rupees to charity, single-handedly providing the funds for the bridge that connected back to Eldin. He helped a Goron.

It wasn't just grand deeds he came to know.

Link enjoyed fishing. Hena laughed at the memories of how excited he would become every time he got a fish out of the water on his lure.

He was a good singer. Shad had heard him humming something while he inspected the mysterious Owl Statue in Renado's basement.

There wasn't a single cat or dog that wasn't immediately drawn to him.

He was good with all children, not just the ones from Ordon Village. A little girl named Agitha couldn't stop talking about her Bug Prince, the noble Hero who had rescued dozens of insects from the wilderness of Hyrule and brought them to her ball.

Shooting was his drug, whether it was with a bow and arrow, a slingshot, or a crossbow.

And the more Colin learned, the more he realized how little he knew about his brother, and yet how much he could have guessed. Most of all, how much he admired in Link. But despite all the pieces coming together bit by bit, there wasn't a single person that knew everything. Even when Colin put it all in one timeline, mapping out Link's path from the moment they were all knocked unconscious in Ordon Spring to when he returned home, weary, bloody, and aged, there were gaps. Blocks of time days and weeks in length where Link had vanished from Hyrule altogether.

And the last fight he had spoken of while delirious, completely incoherent sentences and words that didn't exist. "Gerudo" and "Mandrag," "Zant" and something called a Triforce. He had never explained any of it.

When he woke up, he was sad. He would jump at the smallest sound of shuffling, skitter away from shadows on the floor. On the few nights Ilia stayed in his house for the night to take care of him, he woke up from nightmares.

One time Colin had asked him what was wrong. Normally, Link was very quiet about what had happened and what he had done. He was quiet normally, a man of few words all around, but when someone tried to talk to him about That Time, he shut down completely. His eyes glazed over with something that could have been anger or could have been pain, giving him a distant, feral look. And then he wouldn't speak for another half hour, lost. But when Colin asked that one time, he finally gave an answer.

"Link… what changed? Why are you so sad all the time now?"

"I'm not sad. Just tired."

"Well then, why are you tired?"

For a moment, the old Link returned. He turned his head toward Colin with a smile, the smile that promised all kinds of mischief and fun and convinced people to trust him with all their hearts. Then it became sad, suddenly loaded with weights that Colin couldn't manage to fathom. Link took a deep breath, and his little brother resigned himself to getting shut out again. But then words came.

"Because I watched the world end."


End file.
